Lord Richard's report on the future powers of the National Assembly will be published this morning.

Lord Richard's report on the future powers of the National Assembly will be published this morning. Chief reporter Martin Shipton profiles the man tasked with shaping the face of politics in Wales

IVOR Richard holds the unique and dubious distinction of having being sacked by both Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.

The first dismissal came in 1984, when the remorselessly Eurosceptical Mrs Thatcher was not prepared to tolerate a second term as European Commissioner for Lord Richard, who had "gone native" in Brussels by promoting schemes to improve consultation between companies and their workers and more flexible working hours.

The second firing occurred in 1999, when Tony Blair decided he did not want as Leader of the House of Lords someone who advocated a speedy reform of the upper House with half its membership directly elected.

Both dismissals show that when First Minister Rhodri Morgan offered the chairmanship of the Commission on Assembly Powers to Lord Richard, he was under no illusion that he was appointing a lapdog who would be nothing more than a conduit for whatever the administration wanted.

If his career had followed a different path, Ivor Richard could have been a formidable First Minister. But he started his political career long before it became either practical or fashionable to operate in a Welsh dimension.

Born in Cardiff in 1932, the son of a mining engineer, he was brought up in Betws near Ammanford and educated at St Michael's School, Llanelli, then Cheltenham College and Pembroke College, Oxford.

A firm Labour supporter from an early age, he played truant from school to watch the drama of the 1945 General Election unfold.

While pursuing his legal studies, he played front row forward for Amman United. He was called to the Bar in 1955 and entered the House of Commons in 1964 as MP for the London seat of Barons Court. Two years later he became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Defence and in 1969 was appointed Army Minister by Harold Wilson.

In 1970, Labour lost the General Election to the Tories under Edward Heath, and Ivor Richard's brief ministerial career in the Commons was over. His seat disappeared with boundary changes and, in February 1974, he decamped to what had been the safe Labour seat of Blyth in Northumberland.

It was an unfortunate experience. He found himself up against the sitting MP Eddie Milne, who had been deselected after campaigning against corruption in the north-east Labour Party. Mr Milne portrayed Ivor Richard as a carpetbagger from Wales via London and held on to the seat as an independent.

Had he remained in the Commons, there is little doubt that he would have ended up in the Cabinet. Instead, he went to New York as UK Ambassador to the United Nations. During his five-year stint at the UN he chaired the Geneva Conference, aimed at ending the illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia.

In an interview with The Western Mail at the time, he summed up his assessment of the situation in a way that gives insight to his general approach.

"A lot of the work of the conference will be done outside the conference chamber," he said. "This is very much the situation in which discussions individually between the participants and the chairman are going to be extremely important.

"We are trying to produce a consensus, and quite often the way to do this is by avoiding formal sessions in which participants have to take up firm and fixed positions. A lot of this conference is bound to take place in private, and rather quiet."

His, then, is the diplomatic way, where deals are struck behind the scenes in a spirit of compromise and where it is regarded as "unhelpful" for proponents of one point of view to get all their own way.

In the event, the Geneva Conference was unproductive, largely because Prime Minister Ian Smith was not prepared to accept the principle of black majority rule. That was to come a few years later, after the loss of thousands of lives in a civil war.

In the past, Lord Richard has shown a healthy scepticism towards the kind of fudges often indulged in by groups of politicians who are reluctant to commit themselves to meaningful change.

When the idea of an international bill of rights came up during his time at the UN, he said, "Can we really accept that the human rights of individuals are protected best in all those 35 states that have so far ratified these covenants? The danger is that we may have established a paper facade whose bureaucratic procedures will provide illusion while camouflaging reality."

Those who have come into contact with Lord Richard during his chairmanship of the current Commission have been impressed by his style. If, as has been suggested, the report published today has the unanimous backing of all the Commission's members, he will be largely responsible for that considerable achievement.

The attention will then switch to machinations within the Labour Party that will determine whether Lord Richard's name becomes synonymous with a major event in Welsh history or whether it provides no more than a footnote.